


Public Relations

by misura



Category: White Collar
Genre: Domestic, Gen, Pre-Canon, Theft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-25
Updated: 2010-04-25
Packaged: 2017-11-07 22:54:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/436347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"You want us to do something social," Kate said flatly.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Public Relations

**Author's Note:**

> written during the first season

Visiting a museum with Neal was like bringing a kid into a candy store - assuming the kid had a seriously overdeveloped sweet tooth and the candy store was offering free samples of all the candy on display.

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, too.

 

"We never really _go_ anywhere."

They'd been living in their current apartment for about three months, and Mozzie was moderately pleased that the only person dropping by claiming to be a door-to-door salesman had been a girl scout. (He'd taken it upon himself to check out her cover, but after extensive research, he'd concluded that those five bags of cookies he'd made Neal buy for research purposes had, indeed, been genuine girl scout cookies and that the girl scout, therefore, had probably been genuine, too.)

"Sure we do, Moz." Kate was pretending to read a book, to better observe Neal who was (as far as Mozzie could determine) really reading a magazine. "Two nights ago - "

" - burglaries don't count," Mozzie interrupted quickly.

Neal didn't look up from his magazine. "Five days ago ... "

"Checking out the security measures doesn't count either."

"Then what _does_ count, Mozzie?" Kate rolled her eyes. If Mozzie stopped to think about it (which he very hard tried not to), it was really kind of remarkable how ... _domestic_ their life had become.

He regularly dreamt about Kate and Neal wanting him to help them pick out wallpaper sometimes. Thus far, it had always turned out to be nothing more than a nightmare, but one of these days, Mozzie feared it might not and then he'd be - well, he wasn't sure what he'd be. Or do. It wouldn't be good though.

"Something that's more ... " He sought for the right word. "Social?"

Neal and Kate were giving him near-identical stares. It was a little creepy.

"You want us to do something social," Kate said flatly.

"Well, maybe not _social_." Mozzie made a flappy motion with his hands. "Something fun. Something you can't get arrested for." That last was a rather unfortunate description, he felt; not getting arrested was completely not the point.

"You mean like normal people?" Kate sounded uncertain.

"Something we can do as ourselves, instead of like people we're not." Neal had always had a way with words - and women, although to some extent, that seemed to come down to the same thing.

Kate frowned. "We can be ourselves _here_ , can't we?"

"When you answer the phone, are you using your real name?" Mozzie had disapproved of getting a phone in the first place, but Neal had insisted it was part of the set-up and so Mozzie had given in and dusted off his debugging equipment.

"I see what you mean." Neal looked pensive. Mozzie was fairly sure he was faking it. "So, any ideas what we'll be doing this Saturday? Go see a movie? Feed the ducks at the park?"

"Museum? They've got some good ones here - ones with stuff we couldn't move anyway, I mean." Mozzie appreciated Kate trying to get into the spirit of things, although telling Neal a fifty-pound statue would be hard to move was more or less the same as daring him to steal it.

"There's an exhibition over at the Hipstone Gallery - some sort of educational thing." Neal held up the magazine he'd been reading. "Nothing that's worth more than a few hundred. Might be fun."

Kate wrinkled her nose. "Must be lousy paintings."

"Underappreciated," Mozzie corrected her. "There's a difference. Art isn't all about money."

Neal hummed. "There's a nice little restaurant nearby - Italian. We could have dinner there."

 

Mozzie should have known it wouldn't work out the way he'd intended, really.

"They don't even have any security cameras in this part of the building." Neal sounded vaguely offended. "It's like they're _asking_ people to take these paintings off their hands."

"Appearances can be deceiving," Mozzie muttered, not meaning anything by it.

"You think?" Kate's gaze swept the room again. "I don't see it."

"I meant that these people are _not_ asking us to steal their paintings," Mozzie explained patiently.

Kate snorted. "They're being cheap, you mean. Don't you think that one would look nice in the dining room?" The question was directed at Neal, naturally.

Mozzie pinched himself. "We have a dining room?"

"Dining corner," Neal said. "You know, where we usually have dinner. How about that one instead?"

"Not like you're too poor to get both." Not like Mozzie was really expecting Neal to buy a painting.

"I can't _buy_ them. What kind of message would that send?"

Mozzie sighed. "That you appreciate the artist's effort to create something beautiful and artistic, instead of something ugly that meets society's standards for art and that they can sell for a lot of money?"

"I know a guy at the local newspaper," Kate said.

Neal beamed at her. "Exactly. We steal one of these, and it's great publicity. We'll call the FBI, tip them off. It might even make it into the national newspapers."

"That tipping off the Feds thing comes _after_ you've stolen the painting, right?" Mozzie didn't like where this was going. Admittedly, the Feds might not take an anonymous tip too seriously, but ... Neal could be very convincing when he put his mind to it. "You're not going to do it simply to make this job a little more of a challenge, are you?"

Neal blinked, as if the idea had never even occured to him. "Now that you mention it ... "

"You do that and you can count me out," Mozzie threatened.

Kate shook her head. "You always say that, Moz. And then, when push comes to shove ... "

"I mean it this time," Mozzie said tightly.

"Well see how things work out." Neal slung one arm over Mozzie's shoulder, embracing Kate with the other. "For now, why don't we go get some dinner?"


End file.
